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Best Android Camera App for HDR: HDR Camera

Your default camera app probably has an HDR mode. This stands for high dynamic range, and involves merging together multiple exposures to create photos with more detail in extreme light and dark areas. That’s detail that would otherwise be crushed into pure blackness or blown out due to overexposure.

HDR Camera is an app that’s focused entirely on producing HDR photos. What you get here that’s missing from most HDR modes is control over how powerful the effect is.

The app splits this control into local contrast and micro detail, and you can choose the intensity of each. Ramp everything up to the max and your shots will look extremely unnatural, but experimenting with HDR can be loads of fun.

We’re pretty impressed with the quality of the HDR effect too. While truly intense shots naturally look obviously over the top, there’s no really bad halo’ing around objects. This is where HDR processing struggles to separate between areas of differing light levels.

There are some nice little notable touches too. It displays the ‘brighter’ and ‘dimmer’ photos as their being captured, showing you the shots that go into making the HDR pie, and you can save the separate images too for later fiddling.

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You get all this in the free version too. In the paid one, you get even more control over how the HDR processing works.

There are still some improvements to be made, though. The interface isn’t particularly attractive, for example, and with our test phone the shooting wasn’t all that fast. However, speed will at least partly depend on how fast your phone is at shooting.